The Helga Pictures
Series of paintings and drawings by Andrew Wyeth
The Helga Pictures are a series of more than 268 paintings and drawings of German model Helga Testorf (born c. 1933 or c. 1939) created by American artist Andrew Wyeth between 1971 and 1985.
Creation
Helga Ingrid Testorf was a neighbor of Wyeth's in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and over the course of fifteen years posed for Wyeth indoors and out of doors, nude and clothed, in attitudes that reminded writers of figures painted by Botticelli and Édouard Manet. To John Updike, her body "is what Winslow Homer's maidens would have looked like beneath their calico."
Born in East Prussia, Helga entered a Prussian Protestant convent chosen by her father in 1955. After becoming seriously ill she left the convent and lived in Mannheim, where she studied to be a nurse and a masseuse. In 1957, she met John Testorf, a German-born, naturalized American citizen, whom she married in 1958. By 1961 they were living in Philadelphia, and they soon moved to Chadds Ford. There she raised a family of four children, and acted as caretaker to farmer Karl Kuerner, an elderly neighbor who was a friend and model for Wyeth.
Wyeth asked Testorf to model for him in 1970, and from then until 1985 he made 45 paintings and 200 drawings of her, many of which depicted her nude.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Helga Pictures” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.